snorkbubs

Apologies for the confusion, and the late reply. I see what you mean; my comment could have been worded far better.

Exactly because of stuff like the above, I’m just returning from a long break from social media. I’ll do better. Thanks for highlighting the issue, take care.

No, I am not sure, and I should have been clearer about my information being quite dated. Apologies for that, and for taking 3 months to reply (voluntary internet vacation).

In 2005, when I worked in purchasing, we needed a business license to order their business machines, and they were serious about it. But, e-commerce has changed drastically since then, when the only way to order was through the Dell website. Not surprised they’re on Amazon.

Hopefully, the computers are still better on that side of things. What did you end up getting, and how do you like it?

Also, what bugs me about this is that your text editor is not “fedora/gnome/whatever” or “FUCKING LINUX” it’s just a text editor. Often, they don’t even install with a spell check dictionary. I guess it would fall under “whatever” but, eh, not in that context.

ETA: Just noticed they’re root. I predict their next post will be FUCKING LINUX ISN’T SECURE!!!1

I strongly disagree. How does one even acquire knowledge of military history without language skills? Youtube videos, TV shows, and movies are not “advanced level education” (their words), but writing research papers is. Even if they somehow soak up the knowledge without reading, if they can’t write at a higher level than what I’m expecting here, they’re going to fail their classes. Hell, they won’t even make it to college.

This person is either lazy, sloppy, ignorant, apathetic, or some combination of those. Why on Earth would I want them as a teacher, when there are millions of other educators who don’t have these issues? It’s a red flag is all; that’s my entire point. Of course, there are brilliant educators who cannot write, but the vast majority of people who have gone through higher education know how capitalization works in sentences. Again, just a red flag, not an absolute. There’s no need to gamble; we owe this person nothing.

Basic language skills aren’t an above-and-beyond expectation from someone calling themselves an educator, it’s baseline. When even that’s not met, it brings doubt to everything else they may say. Maybe you’re fine with that, I am not.

People don’t seem too upset about this, so I’ll go off in another direction! The Youtuber doesn’t understand basic capitalization, in titles or sentences, and even the channel name is botched. To add some irony, the channel has “Learn” in its name.

I’m not expecting English majors be consulted for every statement, but the most basic grammar, that small children learn, is certainly not too much to expect from an “educational” channel. That’s bottom-of-the-barrel, and they still can’t be bothered. Hell, there are dozens of websites that you can just drop text into, and the site will automatically fix your capitalization, instantly, for free.

They describe themselves as an “advanced level” education channel. You can’t even get away with that kind of sloppiness in junior high, so the actual channel “level” is likely below that. If they can’t be bothered with such a basic detail, we should not trust anything else they have to say.

Apologies for the digression, and the rant. This is mildly infuriating, but I feel better now.

Looks like you got a taste of the good life early on, and now you’re jaded. I tease (but not really).

Not sure if it’s still the case, but Dell used to assign a support tech/team to each business account, and you could call them any time, directly. They’ll dick around with home users, who’ll only purchase a handful of devices over a lifetime. But, businesses order hundreds of machines at a time, and Dell isn’t stupid.

Something else to consider is that home support has to do stuff like help aunt Bertha find the Facebook icon on her desktop (in the late 90s, I was one of the guys they’d send to her house, as a last-last-last resort, oh boy). Where, businesses will often have their own tech calling Dell, with real problems, that are costing money. Those are two vastly different skill sets, and it would be a waste to use the same support team for both sides.

The contrast between the two tiers really is striking though, and it seems you found that out early.

Everyone is suggesting Dell, and I agree, with one caveat:

Order from their business division. Those machines are designed not to be a hassle, because they want return business customers. Dell business machines have no bloat, and consumer-grade extras often come as standard features on business machines. Just better all-around, even the designs.

Only catch is, you need a business license to order this way, or a friend with one.

As another commenter hinted at, “Thinkpad” used to mean IBM laptop; Lenovo bought the name (and PC division of IBM) for that reason, and they don’t mind if people think they’re still IBM, because OG Thinkpads were the bomb. This is what I was getting at.

It’s bananas that the IBM association is just gone now, because the name was huge in the 90s. Sometimes a fella can really feel old.

PSA: Lenovo has gotten in trouble for hidden Chinese malware on their laptops, multiple times.

Careful with their hardware; it’s no longer the company that built the name.

My answer is probably boring, but it works, and I had fun with my own. Just set up Wordpress. At this point, you can find templates for any site design imaginable, and there are a million plugins for it. It’s an all-around solid platform, that has mountains of documentation. Wordpress was made for blogging, can’t go wrong there, but I’ve used it for all kinds of stuff, including ecommerce. It’s simple and effective enough that I have a hard time going any other direction.

I used to host Wordpress sites on a home LAMP server; it was a fun project that didn’t cause a bunch of headaches, mainly because of the amount of available documentation. Search “wordpress self-host” and you’ll find a whole lot of information.

Good luck with whatever you decide on!

You absolute maniac.

Ghost Commander is a winner for me as well, because it’s also an FTP client, and is dual-pane (and because it’s FOSS, of course). Been using it for what must be at least 10 years now, across many devices, and have no complaints whatsoever.

If anyone is intrigued, here’s a link to Ghost Commander on F-Droid.

That’s really interesting about the archive; it’s surprisingly small. They must have combined repeated comments, which means there are about a dozen in total, along with some recycled Facebook memes. Now that I think about it, 2TB might be too big! …I’m joking ;)

Just want to note that Voat was a right-wing hellhole by this point, and the vibe here is extremely different. I’d pulled out of Voat within a week, because the writing was on the wall; big wall, big writing. I’m curious what is making you feel that the Fediverse will be like Voat, because I’m not seeing it. I’m still new here, but it was really obvious on Voat, just a week in.

Now you have me worried that Reddit, in recent years, moved my Overton Window so far right that it no longer sticks out. Oh no.

I’ve seen the low-effort meme comments as well; I hated them on Reddit, and I hate them here. This topic had come up on Reddit many times over the years, and there’s not really a way to combat it, from what I could tell. People with nothing to say still want to participate (e.g. earn fake internet points), and that seems to be a favored way do it.

Entomology subs like /r/whatsthisbug had a hard rule against comments like “kill it with fire”, “nope”, and “nuke it from orbit”. It was explained in the sidebar, mods would actively remove the comments, and people would downvote them, but it barely made a dent. Scroll to the bottom of a post and you’d see the same stupid “joke” repeated over and over, verbatim.

These people don’t even look at the other comments, they just drop their canned catchphrase and leave. This is why I like that we have to scroll to the bottom to comment here; at least the numpties have to put in slightly more effort, and hopefully they notice the comment has already been made 30 times. Ah, who am I kidding? Seeing the same comment probably reinforces their desire to post it.

The entire issue is lame as frig, wish there was a way to stop it. I know I’d be a bad moderator, because I’d just ban them.